Atlas and Alice, Issue 18
Shalya Powell
The Other Shore Lulma has a sealskin and Kayla has a drowning dress. The garments are both, for a time, lost. That is, until today. Lulma is looking through Kayla’s closet for clothes to borrow, pulling woolen flannel after woolen flannel off cheap plastic hangers until she comes across the dress. There is a brief moment of unreality. The dress is gossamer thin and it leaps out of Kayla’s closet like some vengeful spirit. Kayla allows herself to think cruel thoughts. Oh, the irony. In the three months Lulma has spent beached in Paloma, she has become something of a magpie, a sharpeyed scavenger. She stumbles across missing things the way other people trip over pennies. How ironic that Lulma has discovered the one thing Kayla hoped was lost to time, all the while Lulma’s own precious sealskin sits, somewhere in her husband’s house, waiting to be found and worn once again. “Is this yours?” Kayla nods. “Doesn’t look like mine, does it?” The dress is something a young girl might dream up, idyllic, green rolling pastures, rough hewn fence posts, a meadow of wildflowers and a single black-and-white cow. It is a pale gown of silk floss and whispery tulle that falls right past the knees. Its neck is a modest one. Soft buttons lead from the collar to the waist, trim without being confining. From there, the eyes are drawn to the sleeves. They are, Kayla concedes, excessive. They billow and trail on the floor, each sleeve enough material to be its own dress. On the bust and hems are tiny, embroidered whirlpools. “It doesn’t,” Lulma says and Kayla wishes she never pulled it out the closet. “What is it?” She considers lying. It’s a family heirloom. A crafts project. “It’s my drowning dress. One day, I’ll put it on and walk into the Pacific. That was the plan anyway.” “Then what?” 70
